Process for making unique BBP page, css

I have a WordPress site (3.4.2) which uses a premium theme that I want to keep. I just activated the BBPress plugin (ver 2.1.2) and created a forum and topic etc. The forum and topic pages appear and look ok, but I would like to customize the template and css that is being used in this. I am finding BBP documentation on this somewhat confusing.

My Plan: I will create my own BBP template based on page.php from my main theme and modify the layout etc.

To implement this new template I create, I am guessing that I can replace $new_template (shown below; code taken from bhp-template-loader.php (wp-content/plugins/bbpress/bbp-includes) with the name of my new template, such as “bbp-new-page.php”). Is this correct?

And to modify the css, I can simply hack “bbpress.css” (wp-content/plugins/bbpress/
bbp-theme-compat/css/bbpress.css)?

This approach seems really hacky/inelegant however.

On a slightly separate note, it appears that implementing the steps for theme-compatibility (http://codex.bbpress.org/theme-compatibility) are necessary only if you are going to use a single (custom) theme (or child theme?) for both WP and BBP?

Finding it a little confusing to untangle the methods and their purposes in BBP theming.